I'm a technology, privacy, and information security reporter and most recently the author of the book This Machine Kills Secrets, a chronicle of the history and future of information leaks, from the Pentagon Papers to WikiLeaks and beyond.
I've covered the hacker beat for Forbes since 2007, with frequent detours into digital miscellania like switches, servers, supercomputers, search, e-books, online censorship, robots, and China. My favorite stories are the ones where non-fiction resembles science fiction. My favorite sources usually have the word "research" in their titles.
Since I joined Forbes, this job has taken me from an autonomous car race in the California desert all the way to Beijing, where I wrote the first English-language cover story on the Chinese search billionaire Robin Li for Forbes Asia. Black hats, white hats, cyborgs, cyberspies, idiot savants and even CEOs are welcome to email me at agreenberg (at) forbes.com. My PGP public key can be found here.

WikiLeaks' Julian Assange Wants To Spill Your Corporate Secrets

Birgitta Jonsdottir dreams of making Iceland the free-speech capital of the world. Photo: Bragi Þór Jósefsson For Forbes.

The idea might have gone nowhere if not for Birgitta Jonsdottir. Assange’s message captivated the 43-year-old poet and self-styled “realist-anarchist.” She wasn’t just another idealistic protester with a goth wardrobe and hipster haircut. In the chaotic political environment that followed the national financial crisis, Jonsdottir had been elected to Iceland’s parliament, the Althingi, in April 2009.

Working with the country’s transparency activists, she pulled together the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, or Immi. The initiative would bring to Iceland all the source-protection, freedom of information and transparency laws from around the world and even set up a Nobel-style international award for work in the field of free expression. Jonsdottir pushed through a unanimous resolution to create a series of bills to implement Immi. They would also make Iceland the most friendly legal base for whistleblowers on Earth.

Velkomin, as Icelanders would say, to Leakistan.

“The more that companies resist, the more information will get out about them,” says Jonsdottir when we meet in Reykjavik’s Hressingarskalinn café, around the corner from the parliament building. “They can’t hide anymore. The war is over. They lost.” In Jonsdottir’s vision Iceland will attract both mainstream media and Wiki­Leaks-like organizations to move their data to Iceland, enjoying legal protection, just as another firm might incorporate in a tax-sheltering island in the Caribbean.

She may be getting a bit ahead of herself. Immi has yet to become law, though it has backing from powerful figures, including both Iceland’s minister of justice and the head of its progressive party. Even if it does, Immi likely wouldn’t offer much legal protection to organizations whose assets and staff aren’t physically in the country; they could still be sued anywhere else in the world, given that their digital and print publications could appear globally. Immi could also face resistance from the U.S. and the EU—particularly when it comes to military matters. As Marc Thiessen, a conservative pundit, wrote on the blog of the American Enterprise Institute in August, “Immi calls into question Iceland’s seriousness as a NATO ally, and Iceland needs to realize there will be consequences for its actions.” There could be a backlash for exposing corporate secrets, too. Alastair Mullis, a professor of law at East Anglia University in Britain, says, “It’s possible that Iceland will become the defamation capital of the world.”

Jonsdottir and fellow Immi creator Smari McCarthy are pushing ahead anyway. Immi, they say, doesn’t fashion new laws; it cherry-picks existing statutes from around the world (source shields from Sweden, libel protection from New York State, protected communications with journalists from Belgium, among them). “We’re basing our legislation on laws that have already withstood attacks,” says Jonsdottir. Defamation and other concerns like child pornography and copyright violations, she argues, would still be illegal in Iceland and wouldn’t be sheltered.

Nor is the idea to protect WikiLeaks itself, Jonsdottir points out. The site doesn’t need help: Its data and submissions process are carefully encrypted, and its infrastructure is spread over enough countries—including some servers in a bombproof, underground bunker in Sweden—that taking it offline is already nearly impossible. Instead Immi would foster a new wave of media organizations and whistleblower outlets that don’t rely on Wiki­Leaks’ technical savvy or resources. Already a handful of smaller, leak-focused conduits—regional sites like Africa-focused SaharaReporters or Thaileaks.info—have published damning data. Immi’s McCarthy says he’s been approached by media organizations from Rwanda to Chechnya. German WikiLeaks staffer Daniel Domscheit-Berg, disgruntled with Assange’s laser focus on infrequent megaleaks, has left the organization along with several others to create his own spinoff. “In the end there must be a thousand WikiLeaks,” he told Der Spiegel in September.

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If you’ve manipulated company information. Or lied to the public. Or ripped off investors. Or raided pensions. Or mislead bond rating agencies. Or profited from war, or any other illegal or unethical act, just to make more money and move up in the corporate hierarchy, you deserve to have your crimes and dealings put in the spotlight.

Governments increasingly won’t do this work. Nor will the mainstream media. Both have been effectively bought off. So, it takes a person with true fortitude and courage—and someone willing to risk it all—to bring us the truth.

Who cares? Everyone knows the banks are corrupt and have been for some time now, and by everyone I mean the government and the regulatory agencies, along with the general public. Leaking supposedly classified information will not change a thing. Business will prevail as usual.

WL is q good thing to d e s t r o y organizations, it only works once! Its good to kick the commercial worlds arses here and there – It is even all right to indicate war crimes in the small, but A. should not mess with gouvernments as whole, WL should leave doors open for any government.

Would the US Government appreciate it if WikiLeaks might succeed with leaking out the secrets of the offshore banking system including Swiss banks? If WikiLeaks could pull off such a feat, would the US information gathering community be considered impotent or a long term accomplish of offshore banks?

This is some great reporting. With the extension of whistleblower provisions under the recent financial reform legislation, I wonder, however, if Congress has beaten Assange to the punch. Why would someone leak truly damaging information to Assange when they can hire a lawyer and potentially collect up to 30% of fraud penalties of $1 million or more. Assange is not offering that kind of bounty.